Usually, when my husband, a molecular biologist, hands me something to read from the scientific journal, “Science,” I try to disguise my yawn. But this time the headline on the article in the June 11 issue was “Who are the Jews? Genetic Studies Spark Identity Debate,” so I didn’t have tone down the eye-roll or even feign interest.

Because I was intrigued; the story outlines two recently published studies that do more than hint at strong genetic links between those of us who call ourselves People of the Book. The studies also point to strong common ancestry, and ties to other groups in the Middle East, indicating that not only do we share genetic bonds with our fellow Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, but we also share a common point of origin.

The two studies, one led by Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at New York University, and the other conducted by Doron Behar, a geneticist at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, use “microarrays to examine variation within Jewish groups worldwide and between those groups and non-Jewish populations,” according to the “Science” piece, which was written by Michael Balter, a journalism professor based in Paris and New York.
These microarrays enabled the teams to compare thousands of genetic variations. The information they gathered using such techniques was more accurate than past studies that have set out to look at similar questions of connection.

The Ostrer group, which published its findings recently in “The American Journal of Human Genetics,” looked at Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, and Middle Eastern Jews. Their DNA was, in turn, compared with that of 2,800 samples from people who were presumed to be “not Jewish.” The Behar study, which was published online recently in the journal “Nature” —  a publication that for scientists is akin to the Torah – used a smaller sample, but also looked at three different groups of Jews: the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the Cochin Jews of southern India and the Bene Israel of northern India. These groups, the study found, had more in common with non-Jewish groups from those regions than they did to the other Diaspora groups.

However, regarding the Diaspora groups, the two studies arrived at strikingly similar results: That Jews from the Diaspora were more similar to one another – in some cases as similar as fourth or fifth cousins would be — than they were to non-Jews from the same geographic area. More importantly, these results demonstrated a common ancestry with other Middle Eastern groups such as the Druze and Cypriots, “suggesting an origin in a geographic region.” In other words, these genetic studies concluded what we already know: That our ancestors lived in Israel thousands of years ago.

After all that has occurred on the world stage in the past few weeks regarding Israel, from the Gaza flotilla fiasco to the resignation of the harridan Helen Thomas, it’s nice to have one of our basic convictions of ourselves as a people upheld. As the “Science” article points out, the genetic evidence refutes theories that have cropped up since the 1970s that Ashkenazi groups are descended from Central Asian converts in 800s C.E.

The genetic evidence can’t place us definitively as the product of one crazy guy from Ur who decided to get up and leave one day, or say for certain we hail from the Middle East. But it seems to suggest that somewhere along the way most of who have been wandering the world ever since, are truly connected. And just as importantly, that we appear to have come from that one place.

Helen Thomas was interviewed by a little known rabbi named David Nesenoff (see related story on p. 6) a few days before the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was boarded by Israeli commandos, resulting in nine deaths. The resulting video, seen by almost anyone on Facebook or who has ever visited YouTube, of her shocking, or maybe not-so-shocking comments given her history and background, weren’t posted until afterwards.
And those comments seemed to reflect what the whole world was saying to us in that one moment: Get out of Israel. You don’t belong there. Go back to Poland. Go back to Germany.

In my mind, the only logical conclusion to draw from Thomas’ comments is that we should return to the countries that did their best to annihilate us.

Just to make things clear how well we made out in those “homes” to which she politely told us we should she return: Estimates are that three million Polish Jews and more than140,000 German Jews were killed in the Shoah. We won’t begin to get into the properties in which we lived in those homes that were confiscated. If we decide to “get the hell out of Palestine,” as per Thomas’ suggestion, do we get all that back?

The Jewish claim that we come from Israel is ancient and it is real. You don’t need to believe in the Torah as literal truth to know this. If it were not so, the Muslim Waqf, the religious trust that controls the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, wouldn’t be working so strenuously to destroy archeological evidence from that site that places us there.

Thomas, 89, paid with her job for her unfortunate comments. She won’t have the opportunity now to become what I imagine was the only nonagenarian in the Washington press corps. She said she regretted her remarks, but she didn’t apologize. I’m sure she did regret them, but not because of the sentiment expressed.

So when Thomas told us where to go, it no longer mattered where you stood on whether or not Israel handled the Gaza flotilla well. Suddenly, like family, we circled the wagons. We rallied, literally in this community (and in many around the country). Because that’s what family does. You might have problems with Uncle Morty from time to time, but it’s not up to the outside world to tell you what to think of him.

My eye rolls aside at my husband’s jargon – after all it takes a lot to get excited about protein homeostasis and polypeptide folding in my opinion — science has a way of giving clarity to an issue from time to time that other disciplines cannot. It’s a fact on the ground. And the genetics do not lie.

And this time, the fact is, we come from that place. And that place is Israel. And we were there, together.

Marla Cohen is editor of The Rockland Jewish Reporter. If you want to comment about this or other articles in the issue, email her at mcohen@jewishrockland.org.